


All the Worlds

by RecessiveJean



Category: Chronicles of Narnia - C. S. Lewis, Scarlet Pimpernel - Baroness Orczy
Genre: Canonical Character Death, Gen, Mental Health Issues, Mother-Son Relationship, Suicide
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-12-24
Updated: 2012-12-24
Packaged: 2017-11-22 06:58:33
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,235
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/607088
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/RecessiveJean/pseuds/RecessiveJean
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Lady Blakeney has her exits and her entrances, and altogether too many parts to play. Eventually, the masks take their toll.</p>
            </blockquote>





	All the Worlds

**Author's Note:**

  * For [lotesse](https://archiveofourown.org/users/lotesse/gifts).



> If you’ve not read _The Magician’s Nephew_ then this is going to seem much stranger than it already is.

Blakeney Manor is said by many to be a home without peer in its region. The construction of that magnificent edifice was attended to by the finest craftsmen of their day, and as each generation succeeded to the title, he did not stint to improve upon the work of his predecessors in ensuring that the family seat saw the addition of every modern convenience, but none of the modern monstrosities.

The addition made by the present Baronet that was liked best by his lady was a fountain of remarkable proportion and elegance. It became central to the redesigned gardens, and was a work of art all its own. The wondrous thing boasted carvings of an extraordinary nature all around its basin, figures of mighty lions and sly, wicked gods and many manners of like wonder, all of which travelled the circumference of the great pool in postures of play and war.

The central column, however, was the most magnificent and unlikely thing, a marble carving shaped like a gnarled and ancient tree. Yggdrasil, the World Tree, rained down bounty into the wells below, and the Lady Blakeney of the day was known to laugh like a girl as she put out her hands to catch the spray. Then, on one very warm summer’s day, as her son played with his nurse on the lawn, the spray proved ineffectual to cool her and Lady Blakeney was taken by a sudden fancy to put her feet in the basin and wade as if at the shore.

“For surely,” she thought to herself, “a fountain is as near a thing to a beach as I am like to find here.”

So she drew off her stockings, put in her feet, and stood.

Thus did the trouble begin.

***

Lady Blakeney was greatly affected by that first walk through the fountain. On climbing out of it, she turned and, spying her child on the grass, gave a glad cry and broke toward him at a run.

“Percy!” she carolled, catching the child up and spinning about. “Oh, Percy, but your Mama has missed you!”

“Missed him!” cried the nurse, much taken aback. “Why, my lady, this affection between mother and child cannot be but for the good, yet I must remind you that you held your boy scarcely one quarter of the hour ago.”

Lady Blakeney paused in her pirouette, and seemed much puzzled by this reminder.

“Not longer?” she said.

“Not even so long,” rejoined the nurse.

“Why,” said Lady Blakeney, “quaint and curious thing ‘tis! For I could have sworn had been hours after hours . . . a wondrous strange sun-dream, I must have had.”

And indeed, the nurse would allow much later on, her ladyship had exactly the look of one who had just wakened from long slumber to a world made bright and new.

***

The fountain from then on became a point of obsession with her ladyship, and here I must remonstrate all those around her who should have taken more concern at seeing this than, in fact, they did.

At first it was nothing to trouble her husband when his wife would run in from the gardens laughing like a child who guarded a precious secret. Even when she would dance a little in the conservatory, humming strains of a tune whose provenance he knew not, then break off when he caught her as though he had interrupted her speaking confidences to the wind, he did not allow himself to be troubled.

Perhaps if he had heard the way she spoke to little Percy in their private moments together he might have worried sooner, and worried more, but as he was never on hand to hear her tell their child “your Mama is a queen in a different world” or any of the other fancies that she shared with their boy, it would be years before he began to feel he had some true cause for concern.

The servants were little better, and although sometimes her ladyship’s maid would look askance at a strange stain or tear in the fabric of a gown which should not have been got for a simple walk around the fountain, no comment was made upon this lady’s curious habits until the day on which their son and heir entered his sixth year, and Lady Blakeney, having vanished without a trace for nearly an hour, suddenly appeared in the gardens of the house, wandering around as though in a trance.

When approached by a footman, who enquired after her health and reminded her of the celebration from which she had absented herself, Lady Blakeney could make no coherent reply. She said only, over and over, “I am back. How many years? So many! And yet I am back, and you say he is only just six still? But tell me, George, how this can be?”

George was so alarmed by this symptom of idiocy, he immediately fled to the house to summon the master, who ordered his wife put immediately to bed, and her excuses made to all guests of the house who had come to honour the occasion of Percy’s birth day.

***

After that, much closer notice was taken of the activities of Lady Blakeney, especially as concerned the garden fountain. The Baronet set a discreet watch on her, and it was reported back to him that, although his wife made far fewer trips to the pool than she had done in years past, still there were occasions when she would run out and, it was observed, jump in. Even more strangely, for the longest time she almost never came back wet from her wading.

Only as Percy’s seventh birthday approached, and Lady Blakeney’s interest in the fountain began to grow once more, did she begin to suffer for her paddling about in the basin. Her skirts were splashed with water and algae, and each time this happened, the good lady suffered what can only be described as a terrible fit.

One night some weeks after Percy had turned seven, Lady Blakeney rose from her bed as if violently wakened by a gruesome dream. She was bathed in her own sweat, and her eyes were bright with terror. Undetected by any of the attendants her husband had set to keep watch on her, she fled through the house and out into the garden, whereupon she flung herself full-body into the fountain.

The splash, of course, did not wake the house, and so she was not found until the servants rose to make the fires. Great was their surprise to look out into the garden and espy the lady of their home, clad only in her nightrail, still splashing about in the basin and crying “oh, let me back! Only let me back, for she must be stopped, do you not see? How can you say that any of this should happen! ‘Tis my _home_ now, and you purpose to destroy it. For shame, for shame!”

At this point the physician was summoned.

***

Medical opinion, such as it was, held that Lady Blakeney was suffering some form of delusion strongly tied to the garden fountain. When the Baronet asked if she would improve were the fountain destroyed, however, the good doctor expressed doubt.

“It is certainly possible that removing the driving force behind the madness could generate a recovery,” he hedged, “yet I am not altogether settled in my mind that the fountain _itself_ is the cause. Perhaps it is merely the anchor for her current delusion, and the removal of it would only prompt her to fixate upon some other object. Or indeed, its destruction could bring about a complete breakdown, which I trust we wish at all costs to prevent.”

“It is so. The fountain, then, shall not be destroyed,” declared the Baronet, “yet neither am I resolved that she should remain in close proximity to it.”

“Removing her,” the doctor agreed, “might be wisest. Not, I think, to town—”

“By God, no,” cried the lord of the manor. “I would not for the world expose her to the gossips of society; already her condition is the source of much speculation. I will not arm her detractors any further. No, I think it best overall that she be taken abroad. Nurse attendants and physicians such as she requires will be furnished for her use, and perhaps, in time . . .”

Hope was heavy in the air, but none seemed to stick.

Percy, of course, heard all of this. Percy had taken to listening at doors, for he had learned that matters of great import which are not shared with small boys are often plotted behind closed ones, and so resolved that he should become adept at the art of sneaking up to these, and eavesdropping. He was a remarkably proficient study.

As plans to ferry Lady Blakeney abroad progressed, her condition worsened. Percy sneaked in to visit her as he could, and most times it seemed she knew him for his true self, but at others he was less certain. Finally, in the late summer of his eighth year, he crept into her chamber and found her a gaunt and desolate shell of her former self.

Percy remembered dimly a lady who had been captured in the summer of her glory by a French painter welcomed to the house as an equal. Boucher had set up in the conservatory and cursed his way to a masterpiece. Percy had stolen peeks around the door, and when the painter was engaged with his palette, Lady Blakeney had winked, and blown kisses for her son to catch.

That mother had been the picture of strength and loveliness, never petting or cosseting, but a passionate and devoted parent who had called him her greatest joy and promised one day he would be the prince of many lands. He had thought it a mother’s tender conceit, a fairy-promise to charm her child, and he had enjoyed it as such. Only now did he wonder if perhaps, even then, she had truly believed the words she spoke.

She was not now the woman she had been. Wrapped in a dressing gown too loose for her frame, Lady Blakeney lay upon the couch in her room, tossing and turning, eyes glittering with the jewels of madness and fever.

“All the worlds,” she rasped. Percy drew nearer, attending her words with all the devotion of an acolyte; all the devotion an eight-year-old boy can bear his mother. “All the worlds . . . in stages. I am in stages, scattered all around the worlds. Played my parts too well, I fancy . . . Percy!”

“Mama?” Percy was at her elbow at once, and although his mother did not look directly into his face, she seemed to understand, at least, that he was there.

“Percy, you need to warn them. She has the Word. She will speak the Word and all will be as if it never was. You must stop her. _You_ must save them.”

Percy tucked his hands behind his back, and frowned in deepest confusion.

“What person is it,” he wondered, “I am to stop? Who am I to save? And please, Mama, _how_?”

But to this query Lady Blakeney could make no coherent reply, and was drowned soon thereafter in a fit of babbling and torrents of perspiration. Percy made his exit before his nurse or hers could return to find him there.

Lady Blakeney was removed that autumn to the milder climate of the Continent. The hope of her attendants and loved ones was that the more favourable weather would bring balance to the disarrangement of her senses.

It was not to be.

On a walking excursion in Venice, the good lady took a fancy that the lion’s-head knocker of a door had addressed her by name, and issued some remonstrance or other. Speaking great floods of non-sense, she had broken loose of her attendant and flung herself into the canal.

She was not recovered in time.

***

Percy Blakeney, aged nine years, stood at the foot of a garden which would one day be his, and stared into the pool that so fascinated his mother. Her final words to him had chased him through four seasons, bore him through the news of the good lady’s death, and back into summer once more. Even now he found he could not let them go, and so had carried them back to his mother’s fountain, where he felt, instinctively, was planted the thought that had formed them.

The gardener’s cat, perched on the lip of the fountain on the other side, stared into the water, too.

“What would you do,” Percy wondered, “if you knew there were such a number of people who would perish for your want of action, only you knew not which action to take?”

The cat bent forward and lapped at the water.

Percy, too, settled upon the lip and crossed his legs into one another. He stared into the surface of the water. Only he himself looked back, but the face was a strange one all the same, marred and moved in the ripples cast by the cat’s lapping tongue.

“Why,” he marvelled, staring at the face that was his own, yet so unlike, “I might be anyone, mightn’t I?” He leaned in, staring intently at this phenomenon of distortion as though scrying for his future in the shadow of the World Tree.

“I might be anyone at all.”

**Author's Note:**

> Dear recipient, I know it was terribly gloomy, but even so I hope you managed to enjoy it a little. Your prompt sparked my interest but I’ve very little knowledge of how mental illness was handled at that time, so I was on the fence about tackling it. Then I wandered into the comments section of your letter, saw your mention of Narnia, and the whole thing caught fire.
> 
> It is, of course, only very technically a crossover, but I figured I had better name the other fandom so that anybody not familiar with it would understand why they got confused.


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